Things are heating up in Rosetta’s historical mission to land on a moving comet. Yesterday, the world gawked and giggled as the ESA released a “selfie” taken by the Philae lander (with comet 67P/C-G photobombing in the background). Now, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has released an image that shows how the target comet can be mapped into several different “regions.”

“Never before have we seen a cometary surface in such detail,” says OSIRIS Principal Investigator Holger Sierks from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Science (MPS) in Germany. In some of the images, one pixel corresponds to a scale of 30 inches (75 centimeters) on the nucleus. “It is a historic moment — we have an unprecedented resolution to map a comet,” he says.

The comet is covered in all manner of topographical features, including boulders, depressions and cliffs. While some are quiet, other areas appear profoundly affected by particles being shed from the comet’s nucleus. Because the view is so unprecedented, no one yet knows how or why the comet came to have the features Rosetta has discovered.

Both Rosetta and the comet are heading towards the sun, and it’s anyone’s guess as to what will happen to the surface. While scientists don’t anticipate much change in the defined regions, they know so little about comet formation that any variance will shed light on how comets come to exist.

The Rosetta team plans to gather in Toulouse, France, on September 13 and 14, to determine a primary and backup landing site from five candidates they previously had selected.